The 17th century in Germany presents a complete contrast to its
predecessor; the fact that it was the century of the Thirty Years' War,
which devastated the country, crippled the prosperity of the towns, and
threw back by many generations the social development of the people,
explains much, but it can hardly be held entirely responsible for the
intellectual apathy, the slavery to foreign customs and foreign ideas,
which stunted the growth of the nation. The freedom of Lutheranism
degenerated into a paralyzing Lutheran orthodoxy which was as hostile to
the "Freiheit eines Christenmenschen" as that Catholicism it had
superseded; the idealism of the humanists degenerated in the same way
into a dry, pedantic scholasticism which held the German mind in fetters
until, at the very close of the century, Leibnitz set it free. Most
disheartening of all, literature which in the 16th century had been so
full of promise and had conformed with such aptitude to the new ideas,
was in all its higher manifestations blighted by the dead hand of
pseudo-classicism. The unkempt literature of the Reformation age
admittedly stood in need of guidance and discipline, but the 17th
century made the fatal mistake of trying to impose the laws and rules of
Romance literatures on a people of a purely Germanic stock.
There were, however, some branches of German poetry which escaped this
foreign influence. The church hymn, continuing the great Lutheran
traditions, rose in the 17th century to extraordinary richness both in
quality and quantity. Paul Gerhardt (1607-1676), the greatest German
hymn-writer, was only one of many Lutheran pastors who in this age
contributed to the German hymnal. On the Catholic side, Angelus
Silesius, or Johann Scheffler (1624-1677) showed what a wealth of poetry
lay in the mystic speculations of Jakob Boehme, the gifted shoemaker of
Gorlitz (1575-1624), and author of the famous _Aurora, oder Morgenrote
im Aufgang_ (1612); while Friedrich von Spee (1591-1635), another
leading Catholic poet of the century, cultivated the pastoral allegory
of the Renaissance. The revival of mysticism associated with Boehme
gradually spread through the whole religious life of the 17th century,
Protestant as well as Catholic, and in the more specifically Protestant
form of pietism, it became, at the close of the period, a force of
moment in the literary revival. Besides the hymn, the Volkslied, which
amidst the struggles and confusion of the great war bore witness to a
steadily growing sense of patriotism, lay outside the domain of the
literary theorists and dictators, and developed in its own way. But all
else--if we except certain forms of fiction, which towards the end of
the 17th century rose into prominence--stood completely under the sway
of the Latin Renaissance.
The first focus of the movement was Heidelberg, which had been a centre
of humanistic learning in the sixteenth century. Here, under the
leadership of J.W. Zincgref (1591-1635), a number of scholarly writers
carried into practice that interest in the vernacular which had been
shown a little earlier by the German translator of Marot, Paul Schede or
Melissus, librarian in Heidelberg. The most important forerunner of
Opitz was G.R. Weckherlin (1584-1653), a native of Wurttemberg who had
spent the best part of his life in England; his _Oden und Gesange_
(1618-1619) ushered in the era of Renaissance poetry in Germany with a
promise that was but indifferently fulfilled by his successors. Of these
the greatest, or at least the most influential, was Martin Opitz
(1597-1639). He was a native of Silesia and, as a student in Heidelberg,
came into touch with Zincgref's circle; subsequently, in the course of a
visit to Holland, a more definite trend was given to his ideas by the
example of the Dutch poet and scholar, Daniel Heinsius. As a poet, Opitz
experimented with every form of recognized Renaissance poetry from ode
and epic to pastoral romance and Senecan drama; but his poetry is for
the most part devoid of inspiration; and his extraordinary fame among
his contemporaries would be hard to understand, were it not that in his
_Buch von der deutschen Poeterey_ (1624) he gave the German Renaissance
its theoretical textbook. In this tract, in which Opitz virtually
reproduced in German the accepted dogmas of Renaissance theorists like
Scaliger and Ronsard, he not merely justified his own mechanical
verse-making, but also gave Germany a law-book which regulated her
literature for a hundred years.
The work of Opitz as a reformer was furthered by another institution of
Latin origin, namely, literary societies modelled on the _Accademia
della Crusca_ in Florence. These societies, of which the chief were the
_Fruchtbringende Gesellschaft_ or _Palmenorden_ (founded 1617), the
_Elbschwanenorden_ in Hamburg and the _Gekronter Blumenorden an der
Pegnitz or Gesellschaft der Pegnitzschafer_ in Nuremberg, were the
centres of literary activity during the unsettled years of the war.
Although they produced much that was trivial--such as the extraordinary
_Nurnberger Trichter_ (1647-1653) by G.P. Harsdorffer (1607-1658), a
treatise which professed to turn out a fully equipped German poet in the
space of six hours--these societies also did German letters an
invaluable service by their attention to the language, one of their
chief objects having been to purify the German language from foreign and
un-German ingredients. J.G. Schottelius (1612-1676), for instance, wrote
his epoch-making grammatical works with the avowed purpose of furthering
the objects of the _Fruchtbringende Gesellschaft_. Meanwhile the poetic
centre of gravity in Germany had shifted from Heidelberg to the extreme
north-east, to Konigsberg, where a group of academic poets gave
practical expression to the Opitzian theory. Chief among them was Simon
Dach (1605-1659), a gentle, elegiac writer on whom the laws of the _Buch
von der deutschen Poeterey_ did not lie too heavily. He, like his more
manly and vigorous contemporary Paul Fleming (1609-1640), showed, one
might say, that it was possible to write good and sincere poetry
notwithstanding Opitz's mechanical rules.
In the previous century the most advanced form of literature had been
satire, and under the new conditions the satiric vein still proved most
productive; but it was no longer the full-blooded satire of the
Reformation, or even the rich and luxuriant satiric fancy of Fischart,
which found expression in the 17th century. Satire pure and simple was
virtually only cultivated by two Low German poets, J. Lauremberg
(1590-1658) and J. Rachel (1618-1669), of whom at least the latter was
accepted by the Opitzian school; but the satiric spirit rose to higher
things in the powerful and scathing sermons of J.B. Schupp (1610-1661),
an outspoken Hamburg preacher, and in the scurrilous wit of the Viennese
monk Abraham a Sancta Clara (1644-1709), who had inherited some of his
predecessor Murner's intellectual gifts. Best of all are the epigrams of
the most gifted of all the Silesian group of writers, Friedrich von
Logau (1604-1655). Logau's three thousand epigrams (_Deutsche
Sinngedichte_, 1654) afford a key to the intellectual temper of the 17th
century; they are the epitome of their age. Here are to be seen
reflected the vices of the time, its aping of French customs and its
contempt for what was national and German; Logau held up to ridicule the
vain bloodshed of the war in the interest of Christianity, and, although
he praised Opitz, he was far from prostrating himself at the dictator's
feet. Logau is an epigrammatist of the first rank, and perhaps the most
remarkable product of the Renaissance movement in Germany.
Opitz found difficulty in providing Germany with a drama according to
the classic canon. He had not himself ventured beyond translations of
Sophocles and Seneca, and Johann Rist (1607-1667) in Hamburg, one of the
few contemporary dramatists, had written plays more in the manner of
Duke Heinrich Julius of Brunswick than of Opitz. It was not until after
the latter's death that the chief dramatist of the Renaissance movement
came forward in the person of Andreas Gryphius (1616-1664). Like Opitz,
Gryphius also was a Silesian, and a poet of no mean ability, as is to be
seen from his lyric poetry; but his tragedies, modelled on the stiff
Senecan pattern, suffered from the lack of a theatre, and from his
ignorance of the existence of a more highly developed drama in France,
not to speak of England. As it was, he was content with Dutch models. In
the field of comedy, where he was less hampered by theories of dramatic
propriety, he allowed himself to benefit by the freedom of the Dutch
farce and the comic effects of the English actors in Germany; in his
_Horribilicribrifax_ and _Herr Peter Squentz_--the latter an adaptation
of the comic scenes of the _Midsummer Night's Dream_--Gryphius has
produced the best German plays of the 17th century.
The German novel of the 17th century was, as has been already indicated,
less hampered by Renaissance laws than other forms of literature, and
although it was none the less at the mercy of foreign influence, that
influence was more varied and manifold in its character. _Don Quixote_
had been partly translated early in the 17th century, the picaresque
romance had found its way to Germany at a still earlier date; while H.M.
Moscherosch (1601-1669) in his _Gesichte Philanders von Sittewald_
(1642-1643) made the _Suenos_ of Quevedo the basis for vivid pictures of
the life of the time, interspersed with satire. The best German novel of
the 17th century, _Der abenteurliche Simplicissimus_ (1669) by H.J.
Christoffel von Grimmelshausen (c. 1625-1676), is a picaresque novel,
but one that owed little more than its form to the Spaniards. It is in
great measure the autobiography of its author, and describes with
uncompromising realism the social disintegration and the horrors of the
Thirty Years' War. But this remarkable book stands alone;
Grimmelshausen's other writings are but further contributions to the
same theme, and he left no disciples worthy of carrying on the tradition
he had created. Christian Weise (1642-1708), rector of the Zittau
gymnasium, wrote a few satirical novels, but his realism and satire are
too obviously didactic. He is seen to better advantage in his dramas, of
which he wrote more than fifty for performance by his scholars.
The real successor of _Simplicissimus_ in Germany was the English
_Robinson Crusoe_, a novel which, on its appearance, was immediately
translated into German (1721); it called forth an extraordinary flood of
imitations, the so-called "Robinsonaden," the vogue of which is even
still kept alive by _Der schweizerische Robinson_ of J.R. Wyss (1812
ff.). With the exception of J.G. Schnabel's _Insel Felsenburg_
(1731-1743), the literary value of these imitations is slight. They
represented, however, a healthier and more natural development of
fiction than the "galant" romances which were introduced in the train of
the Renaissance movement, and cultivated by writers like Philipp von
Zesen (1619-1689), Duke Anton Ulrich of Brunswick (1633-1714), A.H.
Buchholtz (1607-1671), H.A. von Ziegler (1653-1697)--author of the
famous _Asiatische Banise_ (1688)--and D.C. von Lohenstein (1635-1683),
whose _Arminius_ (1689-1690) is on the whole the most promising novel of
this group. The last mentioned writer and Christian Hofmann von
Hofmannswaldau (1617-1679) are sometimes regarded as the leaders of a
"second Silesian school," as opposed to the first school of Opitz. As
the cultivators of the bombastic and Euphuistic style of the Italians
Guarini and Marini, and of the Spanish writer Gongora, Lohenstein and
Hofmannswaldau touched the lowest point to which German poetry ever
sank.
But this aberration of taste was happily of short duration. Although
socially the recovery of the German people from the desolation of the
war was slow and laborious, the intellectual life of Germany was rapidly
recuperating under the influence of foreign thinkers. Samuel Pufendorf
(1632-1694), Christian Thomasius (1655-1728), Christian von Wolff
(1679-1754) and, above all, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibnitz (1646-1716), the
first of the great German philosophers, laid the foundations of that
system of rationalism which dominated Germany for the better part of the
18th century; while German religious life was strengthened and enriched
by a revival of pietism, under mystic thinkers like Philipp Jakob Spener
(1635-1705), a revival which also left its traces on religious poetry.
Such hopeful signs of convalescence could not but be accompanied by an
improvement in literary taste, and this is seen in the first instance in
a substitution for the bombast and conceits of Lohehstein and
Hofmannswaldau, of poetry on the stricter and soberer lines laid down by
Boileau. The so-called "court poets" who opposed the second Silesian
school, men like Rudolf von Canitz (1654-1699), Johann von Besser
(1654-1729) and Benjamin Neukirch (1665-1729), were not inspired, but
they had at least a certain "correctness" of taste; and from their midst
sprang one gifted lyric genius, Johann Christian Gunther (1695-1723),
who wrote love-songs such as had not been heard in Germany since the
days of the Minnesang. The methods of Hofmannswaldau had obtained
considerable vogue in Hamburg, where the Italian opera kept the decadent
Renaissance poetry alive. Here, however, the incisive wit of Christian
Wernigke's (1661-1725) epigrams was an effective antidote, and Barthold
Heinrich Brockes (1680-1747), a native of Hamburg, who had been deeply
impressed by the appreciation of nature in English poetry, gave the
artificialities of the Silesians their death-blow. But the influence of
English literature was not merely destructive in these years; in the
translations and imitations of the English _Spectator_, _Tatler_ and
_Guardian_--the so-called _moralische Wochenschriften_--it helped to
regenerate literary taste, and to implant healthy moral ideas in the
German middle classes.
The chief representative of the literary movement inaugurated by the
Silesian "court poets" was Johann Christoph Gottsched (1700-1766), who
between 1724 and 1740 succeeded in establishing in Leipzig, the
metropolis of German taste, literary reforms modelled on the principles
of French 17th-century classicism. He reformed and purified the stage
according to French ideas, and provided it with a repertory of French
origin; in his _Kritische Dichtkunst_ (1730) he laid down the principles
according to which good literature was to be produced and judged. As
Opitz had reformed German letters with the help of Ronsard, so now
Gottsched took his standpoint on the principles of Boileau as
interpreted by contemporary French critics and theorists. With
Gottsched, whose services in purifying the German language have stood
the test of time better than his literary or dramatic reforms, the
period of German Renaissance literature reaches its culmination and at
the same time its close. The movement of the age advanced too rapidly
for the Leipzig dictator; in 1740 a new epoch opened in German poetry
and he was soon left hopelessly behind.